Yes. Technical debt rendered it difficult to create features, and difficult to hire. The project dragged on as engineers came, tried to refactor and then left. I didn't stay.

My understanding is that it was never released, so all of the money the company put into the project was wasted.

This is maybe different from what people normally consider 'technical debt'. I don't mean just code aesthetics but also bugs, redundant code, and bad abstractions.